"Karl, she's not there now. Try her cell. Grant has the number. We need to get moving on this. I've done about all I can at the moment." He was watching the midmorning traffic that was clogging the avenue. He always felt claustrophobic in a limo, even a stretch. The only time he felt free was when he was in the McDonnell Douglas chopper. When he was flying the chopper, against all the laws of civil aviation. "Don't you think that's a little pushy, W.B.? We shouldn't seem too anxious. Believe me, I've had a lot of experience with ambivalent patients." "All right. She should be back at her office sometime after lunch." "I'll wait awhile and put in a call there." He paused. "When was the last time you saw . . . Beta One? The situation at Park Avenue?" "I don't want to discuss it over a cell, Karl." This conversation was definitely a bad idea. "She comes and goes. I think it's getting worse." "I'll try to get over there late this afternoon and look in on her," Van de Vliet said. "I want to see her every day." "Karl, we can't give up hope. Never give up hope." He clicked off the phone and thought about his crapshoot with God. Kristen had wanted to play, to experiment with the Beta. But nobody made her undergo the procedure. She should never-- His cell phone rang. "Yeah." "Mr. Bartlett," came a female voice with a Brooklyn accent, "it's Bernd Allen calling." "Put him on." Shit, Bartlett thought, this is news I don't want to hear. Bernd was a Brit who was in charge of day-to-day accounting for Bartlett Medical Devices. He was forty-seven and not a risk taker and he was always worried about something. That was his job. These days he had plenty to be worried about He had been running a weekly projection of the cash flow at BMD, and the drawdown was now getting perilous. The flagship product of Bartlett Medical Devices had been the "balloons" used in heart angioplasty that inflate and expand clogged arteries. They were marketed together with stents, miniature metal mesh supports that keep coronary arteries open after angioplasty. The problem was that in 27 percent of the cases, the stents manufactured by BMD caused scar tissue to form, a process called restenosis, and re- block an artery, requiring a repeat of angioplasty or even a bypass operation. Other manufacturers' numbers were not any better. But a few months back, out of the blue, Hemotronics, a competing company near Boston, had introduced stents coated with drugs that prevented scarring. BMD's piece of the $2.6 billion angioplasty market had plummeted from 13 percent to 4 percent and was still dropping like a stone. Add to that, two titanium joint replacements for arthritis patients that they'd pinned their future on--along with millions in cash--still had at least two years of human trials left before